live the life you want to have

I've heard it said, and it's been ringing true to me, that the thing to do is live the life you want to have now, not plan to spend years suffering in the hopes of living that life in the future. (see also: this is all there is) Of course this seems like the opposite of the delayed-gratification marshmallow test, which should make it suspect advice. By this argument we should all be off having coke-fueled orgies instead of investing in education and saving for retirement.

I think the right interpretation of it is that preparing for the future should give you joy and a sense of purpose, if you're genuinely making progress towards a future you desire. I enjoyed learning things in classes at Williams, and I enjoy working on research when it's going well. I enjoy saving for retirement to the extent that I have a positive vision of the freedom I'll get from living off that money and doing fun things. If you're the sort of person who passes the marshmallow test at some basic level, then you're always going to get some sort of basic gratification out of preparing for the future.

So the "live the life you want to have now" argument is actually not against preparing for the future. It's saying, if you don't enjoy the life you have now, that's probably because you don't see it as leading towards anything. You don't have a purpose. Or maybe your actions don't seem to be serving the purpose you think you have. (for example, your ideal future life is as a successful researcher respected by your friends and colleagues, but you're currently living a monastic existence in which you flail about unproductively not succeeding at research and also not making any friends or collaborative connections). And in general it's hard to make long term investments, to really sink yourself into a thing with the confidence and motivation to succeed, if you're feeling depressed, strained, stretched thin, trapped, or otherwise desperate. So at least for knowledge work, I think "being happy with the life you're living now" is almost a pre-requisite for being able to delay gratification and invest in the future. A starving person is not going to set much food aside for the future. It's easier to leave some gratification for your future self when your present self is already well supplied.

This is orthogonal to the other arguments for this position:

• uncertainty: you shouldn't sink too much investment into any one dream because outcomes are uncertain. you might go to grad school for years and still not get the academic position you want.
• finite horizons: since you will die eventually, you'll only get a finite amount of happiness in your life, so the way to maximize that is to start as soon as possible. constraining all your happiness to (say) the second half of life is an unnecessary hard constraint.
• basic level understanding of happiness. we have a tendency to crave particular outcomes that we think will make us happy. like "being a tenured professor". but there are plenty of unhappy tenured professors out there. The happiness from a status bump is only brief and temporary before a new normal sinks in and you [reset your happiness levels](the balanced-utility trap) back to your personal chemical baseline. So part of the argument is recognizing that "happiness" is independent of life success: you should invest in life success, obviously, but you should also realize that it's possible to be successful without being happy, and vice versa, so you also need to invest in happiness as a separate arc from life success.